January 30, 2018. The workshop finished its sixth day — seventeen days in all, counting from last year. Four days remain.
Over the six days I have given four Rolf Movement sessions: two to a fellow student, two to outside clients.
The shape of it runs roughly like this.
- Day one of each block (the fourth and seventh days overall): Embodiment and practicums in the morning.
- Day two (the fifth and eighth): Embodiment and practicums in the morning, sessions between students in the afternoon, three in all.
- Day three (the sixth and ninth): Embodiment and practicums in the morning, sessions with outside clients in the afternoon, three in all.
The final day: an overall review, and each student presenting a ten-minute Embodiment to the whole class.
In Part 1 the learning centered on manual technique; in Part 2 the weight falls on how you put it into practice in the field (on the curriculum, see “What Kind of Curriculum Does It Follow?“).
Part 1 practices the techniques corresponding to each of the ten Rolfing sessions. Part 2 works from Tonic Function, learning how to look at the whole body and what approach to take (see “Confusion in a Good Sense, and on Tonic Function“).
To improve bodily awareness, there is work with a pole. To look at the relationship between the spine and the limbs, there is work from all fours, sitting, and standing.
The tonic muscles that Tonic Function depends on are concentrated for the most part on the spinal side, the back of the body. Because a person is prone to falling forward, the muscles along the spine work to support the body and avoid the pull of gravity as far as possible.
Tonic muscles do not tire easily. But when the phasic muscles — outer rather than inner — take over the work instead, low back pain and stiff shoulders follow.
So in Part 2 the work covers this. How do you move separately the front of the spine, and the viscera and abdominal region connected to it? How do you move the spine, which joins the lower and upper body, efficiently and in parts?
Which makes it closer to what is useful in practice than to basic manual technique.
In terms of the ERA basic training, it is reasonable to think of Phase II — the basic technique — as corresponding to Part 1 of Rolf Movement, and Phase III — technique learned through clients — as corresponding to Part 2 (on the basic training, see “Looking Back on the Training — How ERA Training Proceeds”).
The other thing carrying weight here is what kind of relationship you build with the client.
It begins from how you organize your own body. And then:
- When you first meet a client, what do you say, and how do you build the relationship?
- Once the relationship is there, what bodily information do you draw out?
- Why has this person come? What are they expecting?
- How do you see their resources and their potential?
- What words do you offer?
- How should the client take part in the session through movement?
- And when you lose sight of yourself as a Rolfer, how do you return to your own body?
These perspectives are brought into the practice, with time set aside for instructors, assistants, and students to review together, along with questions and answers.
Because Rolf Movement has no procedure like the ten series, building the relationship with the client matters more. Acquiring that through practice, and working out how to offer maintenance sessions to people who have completed the ten series — the material is full of openings.
And as a result, knowing what habits I carry when I work makes it easier to receive information from the client. That has been coming clear gradually, as felt experience, through Embodiment.
Four days left. Perhaps Rolfing could have more freedom in it — not bound by procedure, engaging more flexibly with what a person needs.
Using intuition within the flow, while attending to changes inside my own body as a Rolfer. Rather than technique and knowledge: how do you draw out what is good in the client to the fullest? Including the relationship itself, what do you do to draw out more of what that person could be?
I hope to learn that over the remaining four days and put it to use in sessions once home.
Note, August 2026
A correspondence is written down here.
In terms of the ERA basic training, Phase II corresponds to Part 1 of Rolf Movement, and Phase III to Part 2.
Phase II is where you learn the technique, working through the ten series with fellow students. Phase III is where you give it to actual clients, taking two people through a full ten series.
Rolf Movement runs the same way. Part 1 works through the ten series from the movement side; Part 2 gives a three-session series to clients.
The same design, used twice.
And six of Part 2’s ten days are sessions — two fellow students, one outside client. In Phase III I was present for sixty sessions and my own hands moved in twenty of them. Different in scale, identical in structure.
Not learn and then use. Use while learning.
What strikes me eleven years on is what this design assumes.
If you hand over a procedure to be memorized, the classroom is enough. You have people practice until they can do it accurately.
But Rolf Movement does not hand over a procedure. As I wrote in the previous piece, what is handed over are questions. Which means nothing begins until you are standing in front of an actual client. The questions mean something only when there is someone there.
The basic training was the same. You acquire the technique in Phase II, then turn it toward actual people in Phase III. And there you meet the difficulty of too much information. What do you look at, and what do you choose?
The structures match, I think, because the content differs while the way of acquiring it does not.
There is one more thing here: seven questions about building the relationship with the client.
What do you say first. How do you draw out bodily information. Why have they come. What are they expecting. How do you see their resources. What words do you offer. And, last, when you lose sight of yourself, how do you return to your own body.
Six of them ask about the client. Only the last asks about you.
And it is placed last.
Nine years later, when I received Neutral, the order had reversed. Unless you are in Neutral, the other person’s body will not begin to regulate itself. The practitioner’s state comes first.
Still, there is sense in the order here. You set seven questions toward the client, and you still lose your footing. What then?
Rather than teaching you how not to lose it, they set out a place to return to when you do.
And I did lose it. Partway through Part 2, several people said they were confused in a good sense. Without a procedure, you cannot see how it will end.
That I could stand in that state may have been because the place to return to was there, seventh on the list.